Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, we have had several references in the debate so far to a settled public view: that the public are in favour of this legislation. I briefly revert to my previous existence as a Member of Parliament, when I took part in the 2015 Private Member’s legislation on assisted dying. My constituency was Birmingham Edgbaston, which had some interesting aspects, such as Harborne having the highest concentration of doctors per square mile anywhere in the country. Across the road from the constituency was the Birmingham Oratory, which had very strong Catholic views.

As the debate was coming up, I thought I would do something very unusual for an elected politician, because if you are elected, your voters want only to hear your certainties; they never want you to go out and say, “I really don’t know what I think about this. Could you help me?”. I organised three public meetings: one was organised by the Birmingham Medical Institute and was attended largely by members of the medical profession, another was organised by St John’s Harborne church and brought in all the faith groups, and the third was a public meeting open to all my constituents or anybody nearby who wanted to come.

The format for all three meetings was the same. I had a lawyer there who would explain what the Bill was about, and I said, “I’m going to make up my own mind, by the way; you’re not going to mandate me on how I’m going to vote, but I really want to test my views and hear what you have to say”. The outcome was very surprising. The one group which was almost unified in its view was the doctors, in that the legislation was about what should happen if you needed medical assistance, and they said, “We don’t think we should go there.” Here, again, we have this argument between choices and palliative care. The group which was most divided—with apologies to faith leaders—was the churches. They were arguing from one end of the argument to the other. The most thoughtful debates were among the public, who, in essence, were making the cases for and against, and, at the end of the meeting, when I asked, “Broadly speaking, what should I do?”, one of them got up and said, “You’ve got a really tough job on your hands, love. Just try and do your best.”

I am explaining this because I think we should be very careful. If you have a survey which asks, “Do you want to reduce pain?”, of course you say yes, but as many speakers here have said, it is about palliative care, where the money goes and the consequences of that. I do not think we have really considered that.

The other thing which I want specifically to address is personal autonomy. To make choices for the few and assume that that will not have implications for society as a whole is deeply misguided. The essence of society is that it is a collective of individuals. We can permit it when we stop criminalising suicide, but to suddenly make it an option, is, I think, problematic.

I want to finish with something which the noble Baroness, Lady Debbonaire, started to address and to quote Bronowski, who in one of the episodes towards the end of “The Ascent of Man” said:

“Science is a very human form of knowledge … Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal”.


In the end, he quoted words by Oliver Cromwell:

“‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken’”.


As the noble Baroness, Lady Debbonaire, reminded us, this is one of those occasions when, if we are mistaken, we cannot reverse it.